When John Carpenter sold the idea for Halloween to Moustapha Akkad, he pitched it in one line: "Babysitter to be killed by the bogeyman." "The babysitter part grabbed me," Akkad said, "because every kid in America knows what a babysitter is." The movie became the highest-grossing independent film to date and spawned the most successful of the several franchises in which undeserving victims are butchered at random in archetypal small towns.

By the time the bogeyman came for Moustapha Akkad, he had bigger fish to fry: mass slaughter not of stock types in hick burgs but of powerful and well-connected elites in Amman's Western hotels. On November 9 a team of suicide bombers dispatched across the Jordanian border by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi self-detonated at the Radisson, the Grand Hyatt, and the Days Inn. Akkad was in Jordan for a high-society wedding and greeting his daughter Rima in the Radisson when Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari and his wife reached into the folds of their clothing for the explosives belts. The California-raised Rima died first, her father two days later. And so the jihad claimed among its five dozen latest victims Hollywood's most prominent Arab-American.

Like a lot of youngsters, Akkad decided early on that he wanted to be in pictures. The odds aren't helped if you happen to be growing up in Aleppo, in French Syria. But at eighteen he was packed off to Hollywood by his father with $200 in one pocket and the Koran in the other, and the division of his coat contents neatly summed up his work over the next fifty years. Moustapha Akkad made two kinds of movies. As a producer he delivered slashers to the teen market with an efficiency that made him very wealthy: the original Halloween cost $300,000 in 1978 and grossed $47 million. As a director he wanted to be an Arab David Lean, and specialized in films that used Hollywood stars to explain Islam to a wider audience: The Message was about the life of Muhammad and starred Anthony Quinn. Lion of the Desert celebrated plucky anti-colonial Bedouin fighters, played by Quinn, Oliver Reed, and John Gielgud, with members of Arab Equity relegated mostly to the roles of excitable extras. And at the time of his death Akkad was developing a film about Saladin with Sean Connery. It was his misfortune to have the benign intentions of this side of his oeuvre perpetually tripped up on the way to the multiplex. The Message was targeted by angry Muslims who thought the infidel fornicator Quinn was playing Muhammad rather than his uncle; and Lion of the Desert suffered in America from the twin PR setbacks of opening a few months after the Iranian hostage siege and being co-financed by Colonel Qaddafi.

Nonetheless, Akkad persevered. "Islam right now is portrayed as a 'terrorist' religion in the West and by doing this kind of movie, I am portraying the true image," he said of his Saladin project. Long before September 11 he was always good for a quotation bemoaning how Hollywood represented Muslims only as terrorists. "We cannot say there are no Arab and no Muslim terrorists," he told The New York Times in 1998. "Of course there are. But at the same time, balance it with the image of the normal human being, the Arab-American, the family man."

He half got his way. Movies about the Arab "family man" are still thin on the ground, but the Muslim terrorist has all but disappeared: the film of Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears de-Islamicized the bad guys and turned them into German neo-Nazis, and Sean Penn's The Interpreter eighty-sixed the Muslims and made them terrorists from the little-known African republic of Matobo. Post-9/11 Hollywood perversely recoiled from its preferred villains of the 1980s and 1990s, and now your poor Arab thespian can't even get gainful employment as a crazed jihadi. Meanwhile, Akkad saw the Islamophile half of his work win a new lease on life as Oriental works in an Occidentally accessible form: according to Queen Noor, the Pentagon bought 100,000 copies of The Message to show to U.S. troops before they left for Afghanistan.

And in the end, for all his efforts, the people who murdered Akkad were the most stereotypical Muslim terrorists of all: they behaved more like the psychos in his slasher movies than the noble Bedouin in his Islamic-outreach pictures.

The original Halloween introduced us to its highly resilient protagonist in a memorable and effective way: The hand-held Panaglide camera (a state-of-the-art novelty in 1978) roams around. It's as if we are silently prowling the house, entering the kitchen, selecting the knife from the drawer, taking up a plastic clown mask and pulling it on, so that now we see the action only through two eyeholes. Up the stairs, into the bedroom; the girl dishabille at her dressing table turns, half irritated; and the knife goes in, again and again and again.

The filmmaker in Akkad might have found something similar in the husband-and-wife suicide-bomber team who killed him: Mrs. al-Shamari entering the Radisson, the camera's eye nervously darting around, shuffling through to the ballroom; the guests standing about, Muslims holding their wedding party in a semi-Westernized style, the ladies with bright glossed lips and coiffed hair bursting through their perfunctory head coverings. What does the jihadi think? Is she disgusted? Or just concentrating on her mission? She struggles with the cord on her explosives belt, but it jams, and she tugs more frantically, and her husband sees her fumbling and pushes her out of the room, either in what passes for gallantry in the death cult or because he's concerned she'll jeopardize the operation. And then he pulls his cord, and he and the wedding party explode.

But Moustapha Akkad made Muslim movies and violent movies, and ne'er the twain did meet. His mentor was a master of the latter, Sam Peckinpah. In the late 1950s the director had in mind a film on the Algerian revolution, and asked UCLA to find him someone who knew the turf. The only graduate from that neck of the woods was Akkad. The French gave up on Algeria, and Peckinpah gave up on the picture, but he kept the young Syrian in tow for a movie called Ride the High Country (1962). At dinner in Hollywood, Akkad kept getting asked what he thought of American food, American houses, American girls, so he sold a series to CBS in which a group of foreigners talk about their reactions to American life. Then he did a travel show with Cesar Romero, and pretty soon he had the career they'd said back in Aleppo was impossible: he was a Hollywood moviemaker.

Akkad prided himself on his "duality." "In my house I am a pure Arab," he told The Star in Jordan two years ago. "When I step out, I am thinking like an American." The "pure Arabs" who killed him despise that kind of flexibility, and some Americans would raise an eyebrow at quite how pure an Arab he was in the privacy of his own home. In an interview with Luke Ford for his 2002 book The Producers, he agreed with the author's estimate that Hollywood's muscle was "70 percent Jewish," but reckoned you got along fine as long as you steered clear of certain subjects. "The media runs the world," he said. "No tanks or planes. The media and the public companies. This is what The Protocols of Zion is all about. The Zionists, last century, were persecuted in Europe. So they immigrated to America. They had a target. They were united. They did not permit [statements] critical of Zion. They went all the way to control the world and to control the minds of the people through the media. There's a lesson to learn from them."

Anyone who's spent any time in the Middle East will have heard that, from Saudi businessmen and Bahraini doctors and Palestinian intellectuals and other urbane, educated Arabs of the kind you find in the bars and lounges of Hyatts and Radissons. But professed admiration for the cunning of the Zionists is a more unexpected cliché from a man enriched by Hollywood whose children went to Los Angeles high schools filled with the progeny of liberal Jews. In hindsight Akkad's "duality" seems more like professional schizophrenia. And though he claimed that Halloween was nothing more than a savvy commercial decision, for a schlock horror fest it was, as it happens, very Middle Eastern in its pathologies. Its principal character, Michael Myers (no relation to Austin Powers's Mike Myers, though they're about the same age), begins his impressive tally of corpses with what can be seen as an old-fashioned Muslim "honor killing": he stabs his sister to death after she's had sex with her boyfriend. Its conflation of sexual insecurity and male violence is at least as relevant to Arab culture as it is to alienated losers in small-town America. The only difference is that unlike the various unprosecuted perpetrators of honor killings from Jordan to Pakistan, Michael Myers eventually winds up getting decapitated, in one of Halloween's many sequels. "With H20 we chopped off his head," Akkad exulted, while leaving himself a loophole: "But was it really his head?"

The "duality" of Moustapha Akkad finally came together in one freakish finale at the Amman Radisson. But he'd encountered terrorism once before, nearly thirty years earlier. Many Muslim scholars were outraged by The Message—or, as it was then called, Mohammed, Messenger of God. Though Akkad had observed the prohibition against representations of the prophet, even a rumored glimpse of his shadow (which the director had at one time considered) provoked objections. Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, formerly a Seventh-Day Adventist called Ernest McGhee, decided to do something about the abomination. A dozen Muslims seized three buildings in Washington, D.C., and took 150 hostages, including (in an early example of the many internal contradictions of the Rainbow Coalition) the future mayor of Washington, Marion Barry. Barry was one of a couple of dozen injured. Jewish hostages were abused. A reporter was killed.

Khaalis had several demands, including a ban on Akkad's movie and the transfer of Muhammad Ali, among others, to his custody. The ambassadors of Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan stepped in and drew the kidnappers' attention to Surah 5:2 from the Koran: "Let not the hatred of some people in shutting you out of the Sacred Mosque lead you to transgression and hostility on your part. Help ye one another in righteousness and piety."

It worked: Khaalis threw in the towel. Alas, by November 9, 2005, Islamic terrorism had refined its techniques beyond intercession. Explaining the success of the Halloween franchise, Moustapha Akkad said, "If you're locked inside a house and there's somebody there who wants to kill you, that could happen to anybody. You can relate." It was the bogeymen closer to home he couldn't relate to.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.